Cost of Abstraction Layers (Mike Champion)
Very vivid description:
This thread reminds me of Sean McGrath's discussion of RDF which begins: "Somebody, I think it was Adam Bosworth of BEA, once said that every layer of abstraction costs you 50% of your audience... Let's say there are five layers of abstraction in the architecture. If every layer costs you 50% of the initial audience of 100 people ... By the time you hit the RDF triples (working from the top down), all but four people in the room are tidying the hard disks of their laptops."
--- Mike Champion comment on Adam Bosworth's Weblog: Quick Reactions